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Kelly Hansen: The Bumpy Road Of Musical Beginnings | E73 · In Search Of Excellence

• 0:00
  Kelly Hansen: So my dad would do these things like, I'm backtracking for a second here.
• 0:02
  Kelly Hansen: But he did this thing where he made platinum record plaques, my name on it. And he would say something like this could be for record labels. Next platinum album. It's
• 0:18
  Randall Kaplan: genius. That's saying,
• 0:21
  Kelly Hansen: Go for cheap trick. And Gary Moore and Iron Maiden saw this and recognize this and I said, I have two choices. I can just change my style, and do something that's not me and just pretend. Or I said, music is cyclical. And there will be a place for my voice again.
• 0:45
  Randall Kaplan: Welcome to a search of excellence where we meet entrepreneurs, CEOs, athletes, motivational speakers, and trailblazers of excellence with incredible stories from all walks of life. My name is Randall Kaplan. I'm a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and the host of In Search of Excellence, which I started to motivate and inspire us to achieve excellence in our lives. My guest today is Kelly Hanson, the lead singer of the legendary rock band forerunner, which has had five platinum records in a sold more than 80 million records. Kelly, Welcome to In Search of Excellence.
• 1:18
  Randall Kaplan: Thanks for being here today.
• 1:19
  Kelly Hansen: Nice to be here.
• 1:19
  Kelly Hansen: Thank you for having me.
• 1:21
  Randall Kaplan: I started my podcast with our family because from the moment we're born, our family helped shape our personalities, our values and in preparation for our future. You were born in Hawthorne, California. And you grew up in Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach in the area of Los Angeles, can you tell us about and her most parents growing up? And Hermosa Beach? Can you tell us about your parents growing up and Ramsey Lewis and listening to pop music on your mom's GTOs you too, are riding in her car,
• 1:49
  Kelly Hansen: right? Back in the day when your parents would go out for cocktail party or to visit with friends, you would often see them carrying albums under their arm of their personal choice in music. And I remember my parents going out and doing that. And Ramsay Lewis live at the Bohemian caverns was one of those albums. And I grew to really like that album.
• 2:25
  Kelly Hansen: There's a great bass solo, stand up bass solo in there, and you know, and in with the in crowd and that was really great. Um, but I do have a vivid picture of them walking out of the house with albums under their arm because they'd go over and they would put their own records on and while they're having conversation or cocktails, that would be the music in the background as opposed to putting on the FM radio or whatever. It was just that was your, your custom playlist was your albums on your arm. And my mom with the GTO convertible, GTO, awesome car? I don't think she even knew what she had when she had it.
• 3:02
  Kelly Hansen: And but she was a mom had one by the way. Oh, really? Well, and you know what my dad's name is Randall, I forgot to tell you that. That's critical. Not many people named Randall. They're not right. And she always had the commercial pop radio station on the car always. So whenever we were going around doing errands or whatever, that was always in my ear all the time.
• 3:25
  Randall Kaplan: And how did the How did the rock station or the pop station influence you? Which did you like more? The Jazz Ramsay Lewis? Or did you like the pop? Whatever was popular at the time? Where's your head at that time,
• 3:39
  Kelly Hansen: it's a it's a hybrid. But as now that I'm a lead vocalist. I realized that at the time, I associated singing with being a singer in front and a band and back. And they weren't necessarily a group together. It was like a single artist backed by a band or an orchestra or whatever like that.
• 4:06
  Kelly Hansen: And it wasn't until much later that I realized when I you know heard Led Zeppelin and and the stones I was like, Oh, this is a group. It's not Frank Sinatra out front, or Dinah Washington, you know, out front and this collection of faceless people behind them. So it took me a while to to understand that concept and I think that's different for a singer than it is for a musician.
• 4:32
  Randall Kaplan: You were you were in the choir at school. Is that where your interest in singing, first developed and then when you talk about Zeppelin and the stones, we're talking about Robert planet MC, where they your idols and who you wanted to be?
• 4:45
  Kelly Hansen: Well, as far as the school choir goes, it was part of the normal curriculum to be to take a choir class. And one of the reasons that you can talk about later on why we do our choir participation stuff is is connected to that. So it wasn't really something I was seeking out, it was just part of one of the classes that I had to take was quiet. And I have still remembered to this day the Indian rain dance that we call it back then now it'd be the, you know, the indigenous or Native American rain dance song that, that people would sing to try to make it rain for the crops. And, and have no idea whether it's real or not. But that's what they told us. And I think for me performance wise, early on, there was there was James Brown, there was there was Rod Stewart there was there was Mick Jagger. Robert Plant was later on in my musical understanding, because I wasn't into heavy groups, because I was always listening to pop commercial radio. So but I think performance wise it was it was around that kind of performer that I spoke of, that really kind of said to myself, Oh, that's how you entertain an audience.
• 6:06
  Randall Kaplan: Billy Joel had a music teacher when he was 14 years old that said, this is what you should do in life, it inspired him, and really prompted him to go out and be a musician and gave him the confidence when you were in your choir class. Was it like it is today? Were the teachers pick you out? Because you have the best voice and you sing the graduations and the events on the recitals? Or did you? Were you just a regular member of the choir, and at that point, or nothing, quote unquote, special compared to the rest of your classmates?
• 6:36
  Kelly Hansen: I think I had a short solo section and one of the songs I can't quite recall.
• 6:41
  Kelly Hansen: I don't think that I was exceptional in any way. At the time. I had a high voice. So I remember being in the kind of tenor or soprano part of the choir, I do remember that.
• 6:59
  Randall Kaplan: You discovered that you can sing almost by accident. Can you tell us how you were at the beach one day with some family friends. And one of the sons had a guitar with him and was a guitarist.
• 7:10
  Randall Kaplan: And what happened next?
• 7:13
  Kelly Hansen: This, we had two families that were friends and both families had children. And one was an older guy. And he He carried his guitar everywhere with them. So we were at the beach one day, and of course, he has a guitar with him. And we were just sitting there and he said, Well, you know, why don't we? Why don't we sing a couple songs, you know, so we sang a couple things. And he invited me to sing with his band. And then a couple months later, I was I was the lead singer for the band. And although there was a lot of growing pains, like I didn't know how to use my voice, and every every show, my voice was done after that it was like so I had to learn how to use my voice. I had to take some singing lessons and but I but at that time, it was late in my high school years, and I was starting to have like a mental panic attack about what am I going to do for my future. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I wasn't great academically. I felt that I was smart. And I had had you know, I had a job in a Mexican restaurant and that kind of thing. But I that's obviously not what I was thinking of as far as a career to be a dishwasher. So although there's nothing wrong with that. But when I started singing and started getting the response from the fans, and I started getting some money, some getting paid to to perform, I kind of said, well, this is something I seem to be I seem to have at least some affinity for. I enjoy doing it. I seem to have the ability to do it. So I fell in it into it accidentally really.
• 8:56
  Kelly Hansen: That's i It wasn't like this passionate pursuit, that that got me into singing or into the music business.
• 9:56
  Randall Kaplan: So how old were you when you actually formed that band? What was it called?
• 9:58
  Randall Kaplan: And what was your first gig like you hear so many stories about these musicians? Starting out we talked about Led Zeppelin all these bands play at The Troubadour they seem to be they seem to all have to go through there. But even way before then in high school. What kind of gigs were you getting? What was the first one and when did you start getting paid? was the feeling we said, oh my god, I actually got paid for singing tonight. Yeah, I
• 10:20
  Kelly Hansen: don't remember that feeling. But the first game I played was at a they call it was a co rec center, like a recreation center. That was a park that was basically a building in a park that could be used for different public functions. And so the park services would have a like a team dance night. And they would hire a band and we would do cover songs. And that was and it was playing to like 12 year olds and 13 year olds, whatever. And I was about 17 I think and so I we did a we did we played the junior High's high schools high school dances. I played my own high school and at MiraCosta high school in Manhattan Beach, and we came back to the dressing room after the show and all of our stuff had been stolen by my own schoolmates. That doesn't give you any kind of weirdness in your head, does it? No, but we I mean, we we eventually ended up playing all over Southern California. We played a military base, I think it was in in the Yuma, Arizona. Yuma,
• 11:37
  Randall Kaplan: this is still while you're in high school, we're still in high school.
• 11:40
  Randall Kaplan: Well, I,
• 11:41
  Kelly Hansen: I took I took the GED to get out of high school early because I was getting. So I took the tests, and all it's a pass or fail kind of thing takes three or four hours. And and so I passed apparently. And because we were doing gigs, and you'd be up till two or three at night, either finishing the gig or traveling home from a gig as far away. And but I remember talking about this gig, we have this military base, and we get there and we start setting up. And it's like at a noncommissioned officers party, the people having dinner, and I'm looking around and everybody's in these dress uniforms and with their wives and gowns. And, and I had a funny feeling about that, because I knew what kind of music we did come to find out that we were a top 40 band, but they thought we were a band that did songs from the 40s. So we did roll out the barrel a lot that night.
• 12:40
  Randall Kaplan: You mentioned you didn't graduate from high school you got a GED is so many musicians. Their passion starts when they're in their teen years, their high school years, and they have a decision to make, do I go to college? Or don't I go to college. And so few musicians actually make it professionally where they can earn a living talent often doesn't have a single thing to do with it. There's a lot of other things, as you know, and we can go into that later in the show today. But what's your advice? To those listening today who are thinking to themselves, hey, I'm in high school? Do I really need to go to college?
• 13:14
  Randall Kaplan: And what would you be telling your best friend's kids? Or if you decide to have kids of your own? What's your advice to them?
• 13:21
  Randall Kaplan: Should they go to college? Or should they pursue their dreams and go try to be a musician and make a living at it?
• 13:28
  Kelly Hansen: Well, I would prefer to relate my story, which was college was probably not an option for me, we didn't have that kind of money. And I had no idea what I wanted to pursue.
• 13:46
  Kelly Hansen: And I happened to fall into something that started working for me. So, but I do know that if you choose to pursue music as a career, you better really, really want it because you're going to sacrifice immensely in many areas of your life. And if you're fortunate, you won't be a huge pop or rock star when you're too young. Because it's very difficult at a super young age to be able to handle the weight of fame. And, and or money. Bless you. And you and so I mean, I had a modicum of success when I joined my band hurricane, but before that there was a lot of struggle. And, and I learned some really big lessons with hurricane and I'm, I now say to myself, I was I think I was really fortunate that I wasn't the band wasn't bigger than it was at the time, because I'm not sure how I would have developed as a person with with that environment around me so but if you really want to do it, be prepared to sacrifice and that means you don't get to have all the nicest clothes and shoes and jewelry and all those things that young people seem to want.
• 15:12
  Kelly Hansen: You're going to have to work your ass off and you're going to have to pay your dues and and that's how my aret did it. There are some obviously newer ways to do things that include some shortcuts or not having to work as hard. There are some TV shows that you can become a star overnight, you know on a contest show but the odds are still slim. I think it's harder to start a band now that it was back in the day. I think it's harder to get attention when there is a glut of music and artists out there who some of them would never have gotten a chance to even have a band back in the day, because the only bands that really got record deals were bands that were really good. And now anyone can make a record in their bedroom.
• 16:03
  Kelly Hansen: And doesn't mean they should. So think about those things. And I think it's really good to follow your passions and understand what you want and know what you want, because that's what it's gonna take. I also had parents who were very supportive of me, they said, whatever you want to do, we're behind you, 100%. And that was very helpful to me, because I didn't have someone trying to talk me out of it and get a regular job and all that kind of stuff.
• 16:32
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• 16:57
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• 17:12
  Kelly Hansen: It's hard. It's hard for me to answer a hypothetical, but I can't help but think if I didn't have their support that my beginning would be the same as it was something in
• 17:24
  Randall Kaplan: all of us about our parents believing in us. And I've said this on much of my previous shows, I think someone was told me the four most powerful words in human language are I believe in you. And there's nothing like your parents saying that to you and giving you the confidence to go out and do and be whatever you want to be.
• 17:42
  Kelly Hansen: I think that that's partially true. I think sometimes it takes a while. For that phrase to circulate around your mind and your experience.
• 17:52
  Kelly Hansen: And then sometime down the road, you understand how important it was for you. Because I think a lot of times, sum up what is said to you when you know everything, and you're no more than everyone and you really don't understand anything that an adult says are you some things go in one ear and out the other? For me. It took a little while for me to really grasp how much that meant.
• 18:22
  Randall Kaplan: We're gonna come back to the sex, drugs and rock and roll in a little bit. But walk us through the evolution of your I mean, that's what everyone loved to hear about.
• 18:30
  Randall Kaplan: Right? Well, was it really like, but we're gonna get there, right? What was the evolution for you? We'll go up through Hurricane and tell us kind of what you did not so you're in this band from high school. And then there's always something that changes. And it's very rare. You got Van Halen, right, they stay together forever. They finally had to change later on in life with David Lee Roth will talk about foreigners well, and the change and bringing you in.
• 18:55
  Randall Kaplan: But what's the evolution here in terms of your last high school band, you're touring your air force bases? People confused what you're doing, but what what happened next? How did you grow,
• 19:07
  Kelly Hansen: I left that band.
• 19:07
  Kelly Hansen: And then for a while, I had my own bands. I had the Kelly Hansen band, I had a band called The Last Tango. And, you know, played around LA, because LA was famous for all of the clubs were original bands, unsigned bands could play. And my father was my manager. And we had a fan club, where, oh, man, I think back to how archaic this was. We had a fan club where we had people could sign up on a three by five card, and they'd give us their name, their address and their telephone number. And then we compiled them on a list in handwriting, or on the typewriter. And then whenever we had a show, we'd have to make the calls or send out a little flyer. So I used to stuff envelopes with flyers to send out to our fan club to say we're going to be playing here or there. And and some of those great people still go to shows that I perform at today and that was 45 years ago. So that's wild. And then I occasionally did sessions, started doing some session things. And if my if my memory doesn't fail me I am I started playing in a another cover band. A couple of them.
• 20:50
  Kelly Hansen: And this is where I started to make regular Money, we were a popular cover band called The risk kids. And we played all around Southern California, and we would play five to six nights a week, and we would play five hours a night. So that's 45 minutes with a 15 minute break every hour. And my voice would be trash at the end of the week, you know, for obvious reasons.
• 21:14
  Kelly Hansen: And, but that's where I was honing my skills as a performer and trying to motivate people and to have a good time and have fun and, and because that translated to management of the club, or the owner saying, hey, these guys are really good people up and going, and then they're going to have you back and pay you more the next time.
• 21:31
  Kelly Hansen: So that was really my focus was really tried to find the signals from the audience or the environment or whatever it is to get people involved in the show and get going. That turned into a kind of a bag of tricks of sorts of things that I have at my disposal to, to motivate an audience. And, and that was I wouldn't say many, but several years of me doing that. And I would sing everything from from summertime from Porgy and Bess to Van Halen. And so, that was there was a lot of learning going on at the time. And that went all the way up into the hurricane years.
• 22:21
  Randall Kaplan: So when you went through these bands, and you started your own band, and you say, Hey, I'm Kelly, I've got a good voice, and look for people through word of mouth. Hey, are you a guitarist? We need a drummer. And then as you started playing in this cover band, did they find you? And how did it work?
• 22:38
  Kelly Hansen: Well, I was friends with a guy named Ross Bolton, who was a great guitarists who's sadly passed.
• 22:47
  Kelly Hansen: And he owned the store at a place called the Qatar institute of technology called gi T at the time, there are now been numerous iterations of that. But at the time, it was where a lot of guitar players would go, it was a school in Hollywood, where guitars and bass players and drummers would go to learn music. And with that, they would be playing with each other in different setups there was, there was a recording studio there. And it kind of got you familiar with the musical entertainment ground. And so he played with me for a while, and I met other musicians through gi T. And, and through various other sources, but no one was really coming to me. In fact, it was very difficult for me to have my own band, because I just had to hire everybody to play.
• 23:38
  Kelly Hansen: And when you're not making a lot of money, that's too difficult to do. Because it wasn't a band, it was really me hiring a band.
• 23:46
  Kelly Hansen: So you got to pay everybody. And that became one of the huge hurdles in doing that for me.
• 23:56
  Randall Kaplan: So walk us through Hurricane, which before Forerunner was your big band, and you had a lot of success that you had things crash very, very quickly. And I'd love to talk about the impetus of the band, the rise of the band, and then you two thirds of the way through your tour and getting a call from your publicist. Right with respect to two different album covers, and then things just crashing immediately.
• 24:21
  Kelly Hansen: Yeah. I was playing in a cover band. And there was a music magazine, I forget what it was called in LA.
• 24:35
  Kelly Hansen: I think it was maybe it was Music Connection magazine, and which I later many years later was on the cover of. But I was looking through Music Connection magazine, because that's where a musician or singer would would look for ads for musicians or singers, bands looking for singers or people looking for guitar players. And there was all sorts of associated musical advertisements for guitars and drums. And there were articles about the music business. And so if you were a musician tracks starting out, that was what you would read. And I saw an ad for these guys looking for a singer to make a band. And the drummer was the one doing the doing the ad. So I responded to the ad and I remember I was living in a bungalow apartment in Burbank a one bedroom bungalow and I remember this drummer coming to my apartment and we sat down and talked about you know, what they were doing what I was doing and could we do something together I ended up you he ended up having Tony Lovato and Robert sarzo who were brothers of the two guitar player and brother and a bass player of quiet, right. And so, Tony and Robert came down to my top 40 gig where I'm sure I was wearing some sort of tights with leg warmers and leather kPZ o's and, and a cut off shirt. Who knows. So they came to the show and they like what they saw. So we got together and we started out writing songs in an office that was closed at night, obviously, because it was an office so during the day regular office, things were going on, but Robert knew the either the office manager or someone who wanted the company or whatever it was, and they let us use one of the empty rooms at night to write songs. And we started moving forward with material and then we somehow got a manager I forget how that happened. But we ended up getting different rehearsal rooms. And we had some some investor money here and there are people who will kind of backed us a little bit so we could have what they call a lockout. That's where we had basically you had this rehearsal room from when the doors open in the morning to when the doors closed at night. You could go in there any day or however many days a week you wanted to and rehearse and so we rehearsed in a in a lockout across the parking lot from Sound City, which if you've seen Dave rolls documentary, you know about it.
• 27:23
  Kelly Hansen: And, and good night LA, which was right next to sound city.
• 27:29
  Kelly Hansen: And so we were rehearsing there and we had to get rid of the original drummer, he wasn't working with us musically. So the manager had been working as a tour manager, I think it was for Lita Ford. And she had this drummer that he thought might be a good fit for us. So we decided to meet with this drummer. And so he comes to the sound city.
• 27:55
  Kelly Hansen: And he had a black 68 El Camino with a big block 396 He had black drums and black clothes and black hair. And his name was Jay Shelton. And so that's when this really became hurricane because we finally came together as a unit that work musically together. And then we did some demos with the producer called Kevin Beamish who did a lot of stuff with REO Speedwagon. And we had we had a contract that that he was going to do some demos with us, and we had to agree on the mixes in order for him to get paid. And we didn't like the mixes. He literally said to me, one day, no one listened to the drums anyway, because I was making a comment if I didn't like certain drum sound. So we left the contract, but we still had the tracks. So we took the tracks around and mixed them ourselves. And we took them around to all of the record labels. My previous experience with record labels with my father trying to come concoct ingenious ways of getting record company, a&r man's attention. And as an a&r means artists and repertoire, you've had these guys who did or didn't have legitimate knowledge of songs or music, but they had the job at the company to go out and find bands and talent and songs. So my dad would do these things like, I'm backtracking for second year, but he did this thing where he made platinum record plaques with my name on it, and the song or whatever.
• 29:45
  Kelly Hansen: And he's, and he would say something like, this could be your record labels. Next platinum album. It's
• 29:57
  Unknown: genius. That's senior.
• 29:57
  Unknown: So
• 29:59
  Kelly Hansen: he would, he would send those out with the demo song, you know, the demo tape.
• 30:01
  Kelly Hansen: But that was years before and it never really ended up in anything but it did. It did end up getting me connected with a very, very good attorney. And so over the years, I was very very judicious in my asking for help from the saboteur attorney and he never, he never charged me but he would always give me good advice and and connected me with some people to
• 30:25
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• 31:07
  Kelly Hansen: So there was a record label called green world records. And the wife of the president was at one of our shows and convinced her husband to come see the band. And we ended up signing a P and D deal, which was for production and distribution. So it's not like we had a full record deal, but they would pay for the production of an album. Or, and they would, and they would distribute it through their pipeline. And then what we did was we, we, I think we remixed or repackage the EP, and they distributed for us. And then we went on tour. And we I think we went on tour with the striper.
• 31:49
  Kelly Hansen: And on that, on that EP, then we came back into the studio to make our first record, which was, which was what was my first record with him called? Maybe, you know, I don't know. It wasn't called. Give me a second.
• 32:13
  Kelly Hansen: Jeez, That's so stupid. Well, I'm having total senior moment right now. Well, and we made we made our first record. And, and we and we went out on the road, and we started opening for other bands that were really great, we open for cheap trick, and Gary Moore and Iron Maiden.
• 32:29
  Kelly Hansen: And our second record, had our biggest single on it, which was take what you want. And then it came time to make our third record, which was slaved to thrill with Michael James Jackson producing. And that took a year of our lives. We were doing shows, we had a lock out where we would go and we would write and then had a lounge, which was a separate room. So what would happen is that we'd go into the the big room where the band was set up. And we everyone would bring in their little pieces of ideas and chunks of ideas. And we work on to write them and we extend them and grow them into song ideas.
• 33:13
  Kelly Hansen: And we did that for a year. And right in the middle of that we had to let our original guitar player go. So then we got Doug Aldrich in the band. And we continued working on the record and made the record. And the label was telling us all you know, you guys are our priority, we're really going to make you guys you know, the thing this year, and this is really going to happen for us and blah, blah, blah. So we're out on the road.
• 33:39
  Kelly Hansen: And for the first time ever, we have a junky, but real tour bus, which we're paying for out of advanced money from the label.
• 33:49
  Kelly Hansen: So the label has given us money to tour on. But if the record starts to make any money, they get paid back before we make any money. So we're living off advance money. And we had and we also had to do a publishing advance. So we got advancements on our publishing too. So we're doing everything we can to have enough muscle to get out there on the road and play. And so that's what we're doing. And then as you read one day, I get a copy of a press release from which was now Enigma records, because Greenwald had folded into Enigma, there was a buy in of like $20 million, or whatever. And the two brothers that started the original label, who were the genius. minds behind the success of that green were label. One kind of parachuted his way out of that, and was no longer the creative director of the of the label.
• 34:50
  Kelly Hansen: And the other one who was really in charge of the business end of things. He was out too. So they hired just people to come in and start running the label, which was not really great. They ran it into the ground, I heard all kinds of stories of alleged misappropriations and, and other things that were not necessarily kosher. So we're on the road and I get we we've come to the label. Before we released the album, we said we have this famous album designer. And he's done stuff for rush and really great. And we have this idea for this cover, which was called for the album that was called slave to the thrill. Now remember, he was at a time is a different time. And the concept was this woman on this machine that was basically going to provide her with sexual gratification. And, and it was very who's the who's the movie director then thinking that that story is very mechanical. Dark kind of look to it. So the label says, Oh my God, we love that idea. It's, that's amazing, you know. And so they at the time they paid us, they paid $14,000 For this album cover, which at the time was a lot for a band of our stature.
• 36:08
  Kelly Hansen: And so, we did the photo shoot, which was basically a model of this machine that was photographed as a model. Then for the second half of the photoshoot, they take a photograph or an or a negative or whatever of that machine, and they had a device in which they could put it over the lens for a new photoshoot. And they set up boxes and crates and had a model up on these boxes and crates to make it looked as though she was on this machine in this reclining position. And so we did the photo shoot, and it was it's a, it's a, it's an amazing looking cover. And then I get this press release from the label, while we're on the road promoting that record, that the label was now going to release two versions of our album, one with the girl and one without the girl. And they didn't ask us or anything. But what they were afraid of is that the big box stores wouldn't order the album because they were afraid that it looked too sexual. And, and I was like, Well, that's good, that's controversial. We want, you know, that gift that'll bring us notice. And because at the time we were trying to find, how can we find ways to get attention about this band. And we I remember, we'd be on the road, and we'd be sitting around the pool on a day off and we'd go, Well, maybe one of us should get arrested for doing something, you know, we'd come up with these ideas of how we can get the band noticed. So I'm like, Yeah, that's what we want.
• 37:42
  Kelly Hansen: That's controversy, that'll make news articles that will bring attention to the record, people will buy it because people think it's it's bad or nasty. And, you know, kids love that. So that'd be great labels, well, you know, we're scared that they're not going to order the record. So we're going to offer them a version without the woman on it.
• 37:59
  Kelly Hansen: So then essentially, what you have is an album cover with a machine on it. You don't know what's happening, it says nothing. It's just this. They don't even know what it is. So I was heavily miffed at that, and there was nothing I could do.
• 38:15
  Kelly Hansen: And then further along, down the road, we're playing these shows on the road, opening with all these bands, in order to sell records. Then one day, I talked to the publicist at that label, she goes, they fired two thirds of the staff today, two thirds of the staff. And I said to myself, why are we even out here on the road, we're spending money every day. And there's not going to be any records in the stores. In fact, we'd experienced that we were going to in stores, and they didn't have a record. So people coming to the store couldn't buy a record when we when we were in the store signing stuff. So we had to cancel the rest of the tour. And that and for six months, we didn't know whether we were still on the label or not, we would get no response from the label with our inquiries. So we had to eventually send them a letter says if you don't respond to this letter within X and X timeframe, we're going to assume that we are no longer with the label. And now we're not making any money. We don't, we're out of our advanced money. And we're starting to have to, like sell equipment and stuff to like to pay rent and things like that.
• 39:22
  Kelly Hansen: So, you know, after a year of our lives, that's what happened.
• 39:28
  Kelly Hansen: And it was kind of soul crushing. And it and it made me it's soured me for a long time, about my involvement in the music business.
• 39:42
  Randall Kaplan: Let's talk about being soured, and how we motivate ourselves. And we'll talk about forerunner in just a minute. But there was a period where you are not an abandoned, you are doing different things.
• 39:51
  Randall Kaplan: So tell us what you were doing and what motivated you to stay in the music business at that point? And what were you thinking? Where was your head in terms of your future?
• 40:02
  Kelly Hansen: Right? Well, concurrent with the label going under, and as not having a record deal. There was a new style of music that was coming in, in the early 90s. That was more kind of earthy, and and I'm not going to just nail it down as grunge but but it was there was a there was a paradigm shift in popular music and metal was no longer the favorite thing.
• 40:29
  Kelly Hansen: and a high clean tenor rock voice was not the thing. And I knew I saw this and recognize this and I said, I have two choices. I can just change my style and do something that's not me and just pretend. Or I said music is cyclical and There will be a place for my voice again, I just have to ride this out. So what I decided to do was tackle the other aspects of the recording business that I loved, or the music business that I loved the recording studio. So I was at the very beginning of home studio technology. And I had been in the studio every day during the making of our albums.
• 41:16
  Kelly Hansen: And I observed and I learned and I watch because it fascinated me. So I kind of had some chops to start into that in that realm. So I started doing engineering producing artists development, and I worked with one producer, where he would record all the music, and I would record all the singing of whatever this singer was. And I would sing backgrounds. And then I would turn around, I'd give him all the all the vocals back and he'd lay them into his his mix. And so that was our kind of team setup. And so that was a great learning experience having to produce vocals, I mean, solely producing vocals. And you learn a huge amount about what's important sonically and how you do stuff. And it's a myriad of things. So, I did that for a long time. But then, as technology grew, more and more people were able to not have to go to a multimillion dollar studio to make a record, people could do it in their house or in the garage. And when that happens, people who want to break into that start offering their services to less for less money to the people that you've already been doing work for.
• 42:32
  Kelly Hansen: They go, Oh, really, that's what he wants. I'll do it for this.
• 42:35
  Kelly Hansen: So now the amount of money that starts to being offered for album production starts to slowly sink down as technology advances, and everyone can get gear in their house. So it was becoming a an issue of diminishing returns, that you would work harder, there were more demands on you, but you were making less and less money.
• 42:57
  Kelly Hansen: And that became a very problematic for me, it was starting to get really hard around the end of the 90s. And finally, one day I said to myself, You know what I need, maybe I need to go back what I do best, and that's being lead singer. So I, I had a discussion with myself, I said, Okay, you're going to start saying yes, until you can't say yes anymore, you're not going to turn anything down that you have the ability of the time to do.
• 43:24
  Kelly Hansen: And everything will be an an offshoot of a tree that's growing all in the same direction. That's how I pictured in my mind. So I started researching and looking for things. And one of the main reasons I did this, because all my life all my career, gigs just happened to fall in my lap. And I didn't have to even look for them. But now, at the end of the 90s, I started hearing about, well, there was this gig and I didn't even get a phone call for it. Like I would have been perfect for that. And no one even thought of me. And believe me, it took me years after singing and hurricane for anyone to allow me to sing anything other than metal. They thought they pigeon holed me as a metal singer. And that's all I was. So it took me years to come out of that. And I started I started getting out of it by doing backgrounds for other type of music, I would do an r&b background, or a pop background vocal or whatever. And it started to slowly work its way into me being allowed to sing again. And knowing that I'm not just a metal singer. So I started looking and researching and I, you know, very beginning of my computer time, well, my computer things started in 93 ish or something. And then the internet was really, really slow. And I had AOL. And if for those of you who don't remember, you would sign on it would make that noise. And then you'd have to watch an ad load one line at a time, the picture of this ad that would come on the screen.
• 44:58
  Kelly Hansen: And then finally, once the ad had loaded, and they see that you saw it, then you could go to your email or you could go to your your browser or whatever was unbelievably bad. But I was online and I heard about and this was in 2004 I heard about a charity gig that Nick had done in Santa Barbara with some of the guys from the band there was Jeff Jacobs who had been in the band for a while there was Jeff pilson on bass from Dokken and, and Jason Bonham on drums along with Tom gimble, who had been in the band a while as well, and Mick and so Jason had been in a movie called rock star with Mark Wahlberg and so they worked together on that movie. And Jason was the person one of the people who came to MC and, and said, Mick, you, you have to do something, you can't just not play the songs anymore. The world has to hear, keep hearing these songs kind of. And Mick had been, you know, reconnect with his family and kind of, you know, figuring out things in his life and, and it had just been dormant and he didn't know what he was going to do so that that kind of encouragement from different people helped him make the decision to start looking for a voice for the band. So I knew Jeff pilson, I had been to a couple of his parties in the 80s. And we weren't close or anything, but we knew each other and but I also a friend, a friend of a friend of a friend knew Tom gimble. So I set up this meet with Tom gimble. And we got together and I gave him some music that I'd been on. And most of it in the lead vocal form was kind of rock or hard rock or metal stuff. And that's all I had at the time. So he took the stuff and come to find out later that it was foreign, or was trying to, you know, gear up again, it takes a while for a machine of that size to fire up again, you know, got all the gears greased and get moving.
• 47:24
  Kelly Hansen: And Mick was looking for a voice and I, you know, I found out he was looking all over the world for a voice. And, but I started to have this back and forth conversation with management. So what they ended up doing was they sent me five foreigner tracks for five hits of the band, the original recordings, but without any vocals. So someone had taken the 24 tracks, from the original band tapes, maybe they've been converted to digital, and they kind of just brought up the, the tracks on a on a mix, and sent them to me put my voice on, which was fascinating for me as a producer, because I got to hear things on that tape that I never heard in the much played for decades. Radio releases, you just heard things different, because they wasn't the same mix, I could hear the Custis guitar doing something or that or keyboards doing something that I hadn't heard before. So that was fascinating. But I spent the next three days diligently recording and putting my voice on there and really trying to make it just really fit that stuff. And and I wasn't trying to go hey, look at me, I can sing it different. Because I whenever I went to concerts, I always loved hearing the melody, the way I learned to love the song. And a quality song has a quality, Melody and quality lyrics and is popular for a reason. So it's not my job to prove how different I am. It's my job to serve the song. So that's what I did. And Mick Jones got to hear that CD in New York. And they were coming out to LA to do some rehearsal for I don't know what, maybe they were gonna listen to other people.
• 49:11
  Kelly Hansen: That's the only thing I can assume. So I talked to management, and I said, Can I be the first person that jams are the guys. So there's a little lesson right there be the first one in because as soon as they find who they like they stop looking. And if you're a fifth person, then they're never going to know you. So, but that was my little get in there early, because if they like me, you know. So I went in, and I had all these lyric sheets with me.
• 49:38
  Kelly Hansen: And it's very serious. And my hair was much shorter at the time, because I would decide to be taken really seriously. And we jam for about an hour and a half. And unbeknownst to me, the sound mixer was recording the rehearsal. And during the breaks, Mick was going in the hallway and listening to the mixes. So he could like hear them very clearly, you know. So I left. And I remember distinctly getting home at 6pm.
• 50:05
  Kelly Hansen: And later found out that in that time, they were having a roundtable discussion amongst everyone in the band, and with common friends, like Ricky Phillips, who plays with sticks was a guy I had known and worked with a bunch of times during that producing engineering segment of my career. And he, he really gave me a good review. So that was really nice. So they wanted to find out if I was weird or as an idiot or what and so I remember distinctly I got a call one hour after I got home and they said we have shows.
• 50:42
  Kelly Hansen: We're booking shows for this weekend. Can you start rehearsing tomorrow? And that's how I got in the band. I'd fly have days to
• 50:55
  Randall Kaplan: have. That's an incredible story. And then we're gonna go how you did 170 shows that year in a minute. But
• 51:03
  Kelly Hansen: 75 shows that first year, but we started in March.
• 51:09
  Randall Kaplan: And you only had five days to warm up. Usually you take months to warm up for a tour, right? You're rehearsing and
• 51:17
  Kelly Hansen: yeah, I mean, it wasn't easy, because everyone thinks they know a song in the shower, until you have to sing every first word of every single line of that song all of a sudden, like, oh, that's real.
• 51:28
  Kelly Hansen: Now I don't I don't know the song. And so I had, I printed out lyrics, they were in my car, they were in my bed, they were on my couch, they were in my hand. And 24/7 I was just memorizing the songs, and it.
• 51:47
  Kelly Hansen: And it took several shows quite a while because I'd be on stage and all of a sudden, I'd have a blank, like, What the fuck?
• 51:52
  Kelly Hansen: What's the next thing? Because I didn't want to use teleprompters or cheat sheets. I thought that was lame. So I said, I have to learn how to do this myself. And if I ever start using a teleprompter, that's it. I will not do that.
• 52:07
  Randall Kaplan: What would you do when you didn't know Thor's through a song up on stage? It's hard to remember good hour, you can fake it all you want.
• 52:15
  Kelly Hansen: Right? I remember.
• 52:15
  Kelly Hansen: I remember once turning my head to the side of the stage. And one of the gals that works for management name is Mary Hart. I looked at her and I said, What's the next line? And she goes, Hi, oh. So sometimes, you know, Tom gimble was really good. Because I could look to my left and Tom would mouth the words to me, you know, and, okay, and then and then I'd be back on track again.
• 52:39
  Kelly Hansen: So yeah, that was and then um, you know, I'm getting my stage legs back after not performing on stage for practically 14 years not being on the road for that long. And you know, reacquainting myself with that bag of tools that I mentioned earlier, and learning how to work the show and make the show the ebb and flow that it needs to be to be a complete show. So that took a while. And it was a daunting time. And you know, the band was at a fairly low ebb, popularity wise, too. So we had to fight that along with having a new singer in the band.
• 53:17
  Randall Kaplan: I like doing a lot of depth and research on my guests. It's very important to me, and I over prepare in the Hallmark, and yeah, a lot of my guests have said, wow, you know, there have been points said, wow, how did you know that? And it's fine for me to get those comments. Right.
• 53:37
  Kelly Hansen: Well, like everything you brought up is I remember saying at one point or another, so there's nothing that you dug up that I didn't know about was out there. So, but I don't often get asked about that stuff. But I've also had people interview them and, and they say, Well, when you join the foreigners, that's how much research they've done.
• 53:54
  Randall Kaplan: Right? You're listening to part one of my amazing interview with Kelly Hanson, the lead singer of the legendary rock band forerunner, which has sold more than 80 million albums and those hits include jukebox hero, hot blooded and feels like the first time. Be sure to tune in next week to part two of my incredible interview with Kelly